AMD launches first 45nm, quad-core Shanghai Opterons, hitting desktops Q1

AMD has been blazing architectural trails well before Nehalem. As EE Times points out, AMD's 65-nm Barcelona was the first quad-core processor with 2MB of shared L3 cache integrated with the Northbridge memory controller. Now AMD has (finally) caught up with its own 45-nm technology under the code-name, Shanghai. AMD's newest quad-core Opteron server chip with 6MB L3 cache now offers up to 35 percent better performance while drawing 35 percent less idle power. Better yet, it's drop-in compatible with Barcelona which should keep IT-types happy as they extend the life of their server farms. Available immediately in 75-watt, quad-core versions running clock speeds from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz.

"Barcelona was obviously a pretty rough start for them. And that does not appear to be the case for Shanghai," said Dean McCarron, the principal and founder of Mercury Research, a company that tracks chip market movements. "One of the big distinctions was they wanted to be absolutely sure that Shanghai was ready to go."

AMD launches first 45nm

Major customers are brimming with accolades for Shanghai. "We've been very pleased. Thrilled with their execution," said with Paul Gottsegen, vice president of Industry Standard Servers, HP, in an interview.

"We'll have products that will be shipping just after launch. We had high performance expectations for the product and it exceeded our expectations," he said. "We're going to put Shanghai across the meat of our product line. You'll see six different rack servers, three different blades, all up and down parts of our product line."

Shanghai technology ahead of Intel

Much of Shanghai's raw technology is a generation ahead of Intel. In a posting at EE Times, Don Scansen, a semiconductor technology analyst at Semiconductor Insights, said that many of the features that Intel is touting as new are not new to AMD and were initially introduced in AMD's Barcelona processor.

"Intel's Nehalem is due out soon, but many of the features of what has widely been touted as a 'new' architecture are only new to Intel," he writes.



source